28 Days Later #15 – Review

By: Michael Alan Nelson (writer), Alejandro Aragon (art), William Farmer (colors) & Ed Dukeshire (letters)

The Story: Clint and Selina come face to face with what passes for civilization in post-infection London.

What’s Good: This series just keeps humming right along and any fan of zombies, survival horror, post-apocalypse or The Walking Dead should be reading this title.

In post-apocalyptic fiction, the civilization of survivors being led by some psycho-fascist-strongman is pretty much a cliché, but that’s okay because that is probably what would happen.  The closest we have to post-apocalypse in the real world are lawless places like Somalia and regions along the Afghan/Pakistan border and they sure haven’t turned into a worker’s utopia because the happy dudes who want to work together and smoke weed are quickly overrun by madmen with guns who want to take their food and gasoline.

So, it is appropriate that this excellent series would bring Clint and Selina into contact with a group like this.  What is key is how Nelson creates the character of the leader and he does a good job of not making him a complete idiot-psycho.  This has to be a person who hopeless survivors would follow for some reason and Nelson realizes the importance of making the leader someone who provides security and food.  It might be taking things too far, but some will see a slight amount of allegory in what frightened humans will accept from leaders who promise security.

The “star” of this issue, however, is the initiation rite that the leader inflicts on one of our heroes.  It is both creative and absolutely horrifying!

Once again, Aragon’s art is very effective.  His art is mostly working with Nelson’s script to tell a story, so the art is fairly contained.  However, he does play around with perspective to make panels interesting to look at without sacrificing the story.

28 Days Later #14 – Review

By: Michael Alan Nelson (writer), Alejandro Aragon (art), William Farmer (colors) & Ed Dukeshire (letters)

The Story: Our band finally makes it to London, but will it be what they expect?

What’s Good: Last month I was getting a little sour on 28 Days because I thought that the quest to reach London was getting so horrific that I just couldn’t imagine any group hanging in there.  Sane people would walk away and say, “No thanks!  Too hard!”

I should be a comics editor (LOL) because as if the creative team read my mind, they change things up in a big way in this issue. First, let’s get a SPOILER WARNING out here…

The big news in this issue is the death of a central character.  In some ways I feel a little silly saying “central” character because how attached can you really be to a character in an comics series that is only up to issue #14???  Well, it turns out that you see how attached you are when you see a final scene that is as well handled as this one.  The death is meaningful and is managed in a very touching manner.  I wish Second Coming had given Nightcrawler as good of a final scene as this.

In other developments, our survivors reach London.  The comic is going to get very obvious comparisons to The Walking Dead and those comparisons will not stop because of the events of this issue.  I mean that mostly in a good way.  Not only are stories like 28 Days about the horror of being chased by zombies (or the “infected”), they are about the complete breakdown of human society and seeing what sorts of barbaric systems the less altruistic survivors will make up.  So, much like the really awful things in TWD come via the other humans, we start to see that here in downtown London.  It is a very timely change of gears for this series and I’m interested to see how the creative team will progress this story without making 28 Days into a TWD-clone (assuming that they are very aware of TWD).

28 Days Later #13 – Review

By: Michael Alan Nelson (writer), Alejandro Aragorn (art), William Farmer (colors) & Ed Dukeshire (letters)

The Story: Having escaped the US military field compound, our gang continues their quest to reach London to do a journalistic story on the Rage virus.

What’s Good: This story just keeps trucking along, moving our gang from one tight spot to another.  It doesn’t let up for a second and is really compelling and tense to read.  In the last couple issues, we had seen our gang get apprehended by a US military science group that was set up to study the Rage virus and then escape, but not before the young boy traveling with them loses his life.

Now our gang is thrown right back into the frying pan after accidentally getting onto a train that is LOADED with the infected which leads to a classic comic book cliffhanger, “Yes, we can do that, but one of us will have to stay behind” – situation.  When you see a cliff-hanger like that in the X-Men, you just laugh it off and know that before any heroic sacrifices happen in next month’s issue, some other superpowered character will pop out of a time warp to save the day or it will turn out that the whole thing was a training exercise in the Danger Room.  That isn’t going to happen in 28 Days Later, so you know that something grim might happen next month.

28 Days Later #12 – Review

By: Michael Alan Nelson (writer), Declan Shalvey (artist), William Farmer (colors) & Ed Dukeshire (letters)

The Story: After getting captured by the U.S. military, our heroes must find a way to escape back into the “sanctuary” of a British countryside that is crawling with infected.

Since this is the first review I’ve done of this series, I would like to say a little more about the series in general.  Basically, if you like The Walking Dead, you’ll enjoy this series from Boom!.  Most comics based on licensed properties just stink, but this is an exception.  This series is set after the events of the movie, 28 Days Later, but you really needn’t have seen the movie to enjoy the comic.  I had never seen the film until I’d read issue #7 and it neither enhanced nor took away from my enjoyment of the comic.  If anything, I think I enjoy the comic more than the film.  It is enough to know that the island of Great Britain has been overrun by a populace infected with this rage virus that turns them into howling banshees (not really zombies, per se).  The comic follows Selina (the heroine of the movie) as she is enlisted by a journalist who wants to get into London to report on the disaster and the crap that happens to them along the way.

What’s Good: One thing that this series has done very well is make sure that you don’t think anyone is safe.  As compared to when you see Spider-Man supposedly killed, even if you can’t figure a way that it didn’t really happen, you have an expectation that the secret will be revealed in the next issue and Spidey will be okay.  Not in this series!  Just about anyone could die at any time and in this issue the creators drive that point home by killing off the youngest member of the band in a pretty ghastly way.  I’ll give them major kudos for being willing to do what is necessary to keep the readers on their toes.

I also like that by the end of this issue, the heroes are out of the military encampment and back out into the wilderness.  I hate to keep comparing this to The Walking Dead, but that series has used very well this bouncing back and forth between safe/not-safe……except that when you’re safe from the infected, you’re now locked up with the humans and that might not be an improvement in your condition.

The art in this series is typically strong and this issue is no exception.  Shalvey does art that is perfect for a series like this: no gaudy double-page spreads, just panel-by-panel effective story-telling.